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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (1069)	5/9/2003 1:37:06 PM
From: tsigprofit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

The Gore-ing of John Kerry salon.com The Gore-ing of John Kerry They've already made fact-free charges that he's a "phony" with deep "identity" problems. Will a toxic press corps eager for a takedown poison the senator's presidential chances the way it did Al Gore's? - - - - - - - - - - - - By Ben Fritz May 7, 2003 \| Media accounts describe him as phony and calculating, incapable of making a heartfelt statement. His history is analyzed cynically, sometimes falsely: Misrepresentations of his statements and actions metastasize into myth. As a result, he is seen as the archetypal slippery, soulless politician. That much of the supporting evidence is false seems utterly beside the point. That's how Republicans caricatured Al Gore in 2000 -- a line the media dutifully parroted. And as the 2004 presidential campaign gets underway, it's happening again. This time the victim is Sen. John Kerry. Like Gore, the Massachusetts Democrat has been characterized, with some justice, as being aloof and cold. On Saturday, when asked about his haughty image during the first debate among the Democratic candidates, he tried to laugh it off (in much the same way Gore unsuccessfully joked about being stiff in 2000) by suggesting he "ought to just disappear and contemplate that by myself." But the press has pushed its pseudo-analysis of Kerry far beyond the innocuous observation that he lacks charisma. And in so doing, it is following the same irresponsible course it did with Gore. As Gore and now Kerry are learning the hard way, you can't laugh off an image problem to a press corps that now almost always takes personality more seriously than policy. That reporting style has exploded in popularity ever since the New York Times' Maureen Dowd took her acid observations on the presidential campaign trail in 1992 and became a household name. The Washington Monthly observed at the time that "Today's campaign planes and buses are freighted with Dowd disciples: hyperliterate capital-W Writers with an eye for detail and an ear for the shuffling going on behind the curtain." Over time, it's created an even greater blood lust among political reporters for that canny observation or cutting insight -- and whether they are true or not doesn't always seem to matter.